Micro Gallery: Sky
Theme: Australian landscape
Exhibition continues downstairs in the Garden Gallery
The second installment of the Wesfarmers Collection display focuses
on the idea of landscape and what contemporary explorations of the
theme can show us about our place, tastes and traditions. Antipodean
trees and intense light that among other elements have come to define
the ‘iconic Australian landscape’ can be found in the paintings of
Eugene von Guerard, Arthur Streeton and Frederick McCubbin, whose
works you can view in our Centenary Galleries. Indeed, the European,
and by extension, Australian, landscape tradition has been seeped in
symbolism, metaphor and philosophy of the day. In addition to the two
works in the Garden Gallery (downstairs), the works in the Sky Gallery
also attest to the contemporary manifestations of this.
The Kimberley region comprises a significant geographical and
cultural part of the Western Australian landscape. The role of its land
to Indigenous peoples’ culture and traditions is evident in the work
of Kimberley artists like Patrick Mung Mung. Working as a drover in
the East Kimberley most of his life, Mung Mung started painting late,
following in the footsteps of his father George. Like his contemporary
Jack Britton, his deep connection and knowledge of Country comes
out in his works depicting mainly Purnululu (the Bungle Bungles) and
Ngarrgooroon Country, the latter defined by many hills and waterholes.
Part of the Warmun community, he paints in his own distinctive style
based on traditional ochre painting, using block colours and ochres
sourced from the country he is painting.
Subject to many elements and weather changes, the Kimberley, like
much of Australia, has battled with heavy storms and bushfires. One
of these bushfires, with its rapid advance, has been depicted by WA
painter George Haynes in Bushfire (1983), painted the same year as
Delafield Cook’s A haystack in the Garden Gallery. The two visions of
the Kimberley—Mung Mung’s and Haynes’—side-by-side respectively
depict how culture and nature have worked together to define that
landscape over millennia.
Bringing them together is Howard Taylor’s Bush fire sun (1996), which
transcends landscape painting through observation of the life source
itself. With the help of bush fire haze, he turns light, an object of his
life-long painterly enquiry, in on itself and guides us to look at it as an
object in space.
While painterly concerns still dominate the genre of landscape painting
so too does narrative. Western Desert-born artist Pantjiti Mary McLean
uses her canvases as storyboards to tell stories from her childhood
and to depict traditional life. Much of her knowledge was acquired
before she had any contact with white society, contact which was
marked by the removal of her son, and knowledge which she has used
to tell ‘secular’ stories. Living on the land (2000) depicts a woman
having a baby that is being smelled by a dog who will protect it, while
another dog has caught an emu, which another woman is preparing to
cook. A poisonous snake appears and people scatter, while men hunt
kangaroo and birds fight with each other. For McLean, this painting is
‘a big story about life on the land. Ngurranka—home.’
What is subterranean is sometimes just as fascinating as what is on and
above land. Like ambers burning underground for weeks after a fire,
tree roots, animal borrows and substrata have their own version of the
sublime. Andrew Browne’s painting Visitation (2009) is a process of
painting and removing pigment and yet it reminds us of photograms,
images created by laying an object directly onto a light-sensitive plate,
exposing it and defining the object in stark white. The title Visitation
reminds us of another photographic practice, that of spirit and aura
photography linked with the occult. The tree roots, stumps and
accidental objects found or imagined in Browne’s landscape travels
have a life of their own, independent from us, and yet, at the same
time, crave our gaze to imbue them with meaning.
When landscape and people come together, history is made. Dowerin
and Wyalkatchem are two towns in the Western Australian wheat
belt where photographer Brad Rimmer grew up. Subject of his series
Silence, the towns which were once the administrative and community
centres of the WA food bowl, now rest on a dwindling population and
social struggles. The dusty drive-in at Dowerin has been desolate for
years, but left as a memento of a once vibrant community, a moment
of reminiscing or a prop to tell stories. The tractor tracks seem to
point out of Wyalkatchem, leaving us to imagine the last vehicle slowly
driving out of town and towards the coast. While Delafield Cook’s vision
downstairs rests on promises, dreams and futuristic utopias, Rimmer’s
is that of contemporary reality.
Dunja
Rmandić
Associate Curator Projects